Installation

Installation of MKStats should be fairly simple, since it is written in Perl and does not need to be compiled. Some knowledge of your system is required, however, so if you do not know some of it, you will need to check with your site administrator. The following steps should be followed to completely install the program.

Install Perl on your system.

MKStats requires Perl 5, and will not function with Perl 4. Since there are some bugs in some versions of Perl 5.001, it is recommended that you download the latest 5.002 (or later) release. It will, however, work with some versions of Perl 5.001. To test which version of Perl you have, type 'perl -v'.
Perl is already installed on most systems, but if it isn't you will need to install it and set it up. I did not write Perl and there are many different issues involved with installing it, so I cannot and will not support Perl itself.
To download Perl, visit the Acquiring Perl Software page. Windows 95/NT users should download Hip Communications' excellent Win32 version of Perl 5.

Choose a directory to install into

MKStats can be installed in any directory on your machine. Put everything in the directory you plan to keep it in before running install.pl

Un-compress the file

If you downloaded the .zip version of MKStats, be sure to unzip it using the '-d' option to preserve the directory structure. After you uncompress the file, there will be a 'mkstats' directory under the current directory where all files are stored. If you are using Windows, you should use a program like WinZip to unzip the file to preserve long filenames.

Run install.pl Change into the mkstats directory and run 'perl install.pl'. This will setup some settings for MKStats, and will write mkstats.pl to the directory. You must run install.pl or there will be no mkstats.pl to run.

Edit the config file

MKStats uses a configuration file to set options and variables. Each time you run the program, you must specify a config file to use. Specific configuration information can be found in the Setup section of the documentation. The config files can either be moved into the mkstats directory, or stay in the config directory and they will be detected when run. If you change the location of the config file, you will need to specify the path to the file when you run the program.

Install GD.pm

(Note: The GD Tools are all available at www.mkstats.com)
If you want to enable the graphical reports in MKStats, you need to install special libraries to handle those routines. If you do not use those routines, you do not need to install these extras. This is where it gets tricky...
GD.pm: To install GD.pm, there are two steps (on unix, that is). First, you must compile the GD libraries, which were written in C by Tom Boutell. The full GD distribution can be found at ftp://mkstats.com/ in the gd-tools file. Documentation for compiling it is included.
After setting up GD, you need to install GD.pm, the Perl interface to the GD libraries by Lincoln Stein. The full distribution of GD.pm is included in the GD-Tools file and the full documentation can be found at The official site.
Dave Roth has ported the complete GD.pm library to Win32 versions of Perl, and it is extremely simple to set up. So, for NT and 95 users, you will not need to compile anything or do special installs. Please read the setup information in the 'win32GD' directory about how to install the libraries.

I do not support these programs. They were written by the talented people mentioned above, and I cannot help with bug reports or installation help with these particular utilities.

Create a report directory

Create a directory where your reports will be created. This should be a directory accessible by external web browsers if you would like to check your stats from an external site.

That's It!

At this point, MKStats should be installed and you are ready to setup your configuration file(s).